New paintings from a 3 month seige of 22 Calvert Avenue.

'It is thanks to Nonna Materkova that I have been able to make these paintings. Nonna kindly allowed me a short residency to work in her gallery whilst renovation was taking place. A week it was meant to be, but like all these things in life, you end up staying longer.

'I was bored of a lot of paintings I was seeing. I wanted an ambitious image not images of celebrities that everyone else was painting. A heavyweight image that I could learn to love. That would give me scope to paint as freely as possible. An image that nobody dare touch as a western artist.'

Howard Dyke, January 2009